Jim Small has covered Arizona politics for more than 20 years. During that time, he’s spent time at protests, rallies and all sorts of political events in the state’s Capitol in Phoenix.
But thanks to former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies and the venom stoked at journalists casually on right-wing media outlets like Fox News, Small said for the first time in his long career as a reporter and editor that he can’t take his safety for granted.
Small said at a press conference following the 2020 election, a person dressed in clothing decked out with extremist insignias confronted one of his Arizona Mirror colleagues. He chose not to name him out of concern for his continued safety.
“The man came up to him and basically told him, ‘I know who you are, and I’m keeping my eye on you, and if you make a wrong move, you’re going to get it,’” Small recalled. “We spoke to law enforcement about it, and nothing ended up coming out of it, but it was unsettling and definitely concerning.”
Small and many other local reporters across the country have been forced to deal with an increasingly alarming trend in our media ecosystem — the nationalization of news led by outlets like Fox News, which often grab local stories, strip them of their context, and use them to push political agendas or conspiracy theories aimed at keeping their viewers angry. That anger trickles back down into communities, infects local politics and forces reporters at small news outlets already stretched thin to grapple with larger issues of misinformation and polarization.
In Arizona’s case, former President Trump’s lies about the results of the 2020 election have created a cesspool of misinformation in the state’s midterm elections. Those lies were weaponized early and often by outlets like Fox News (which, ironically, was the first major network to call Arizona for then-candidate Joe Biden), where some hosts openly pushed unfounded information about voter fraud and repeatedly attacked Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is currently suing the network for $1.6 billion and is the most serious legal threat Fox News has encountered based on irresponsible and baseless programming.
In response to our request for comment on this article, Fox News sent us a statement on the Dominion lawsuit, “We are confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected. In addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs.”
According to Small, the result is a midterm election where Republicans in most big-ticket races have backed Trump’s election lies, led by gubernatorial candidate (and former television news anchor) Kari Lake. This has distorted the race away from issues important to Arizona voters as candidates seek out outlets like Fox News, One America News and Newsmax to raise funds.
“What ends up happening is you have a lot more to write about because these extreme candidates are in a forum where they feel safe and unguarded,” Small said. “There are newsworthy things that come out of these shows because they’re saying things that are way outside the norm from what you’d expect a serious candidate for statewide office to be saying.”
Local-news distortions as ammunition in the culture wars
Apart from lies about the 2020 election (which the network has since backed away from as support for Trump wanes), Fox News hosts tend to push “culture war” issues related to race, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration or what’s being taught at schools.
Critical race theory is an example of this ecosystem at work. Right-wing media outlets took the term — an academic framework that focuses on lingering racism across U.S. institutions — and used it as a catch-all term and associated it with any local news report involving school districts teaching about racism in America. It didn’t take long before misleading and out-of-context stories trickled down into local communities. School board meetings became polarized battlefields over everything from masks in schools to curriculum critics claimed had a progressive agenda.
While working at her first newspaper job, it was one of Anna Lynn Winfrey’s responsibilities to cover school board meetings for the Montrose Daily Press in Colorado.
But last year, Winfrey — who has since joined the Pueblo Chieftain to cover politics — began to notice meetings were becoming much more heated and confrontational. It wasn’t long before she was forced to deal with misinformation about critical race theory, which school board candidates falsely claimed was being taught at the Montrose County School District.
“I was one of just a small handful of local reporters in Montrose, and I didn’t want to waste my time on these national conspiracy theories,” Winfrey said. “So, in my articles, I would write that the candidates spoke about critical race theory, but the superintendent said it wasn’t being taught there. I tried to emphasize the local impacts as much as possible.”
The right-wing activism against critical race theory was pushed far and wide on Facebook, where so-called “concerned citizens” pushed the misinformation about public schools into unsuspecting communities across the country. But Fox News, easily the most-watched cable news network in the country, quickly became one of the largest conduits of out-of-context information regarding critical race theory.
Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog, tracked the numbers and found that Fox News mentioned critical race theory over 3,900 times in 2021, compared to just 1,854 mentions combined on MSNBC and CNN over that same timeframe (which mainly included segments explaining the term and debunking false claims about its use in public schools).
“It’s not an accident that critical race theory is dominating local school board meetings,” said Dannagal Young, a communications and political science professor at the University of Delaware. “If you ask those people where it came from, if you follow those breadcrumbs, it goes back to the conservative media ecosystem, which keeps its audience engaged and loyal through this reinforcement of identity threat.”
“And now that has trickled down to our local communities,” Young added.
Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, who lost his job following the 2020 election and wrote “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” told E&P Publisher Mike Blinder during an E&P Reports vodcast that it’s no surprise the network and so many national outlets lean hard on culture wars coverage and bypass real reporting.
“Culture wars news is easier; personalities and emotions are easier to do than hard news because hard news requires you to spend money. … You have a lot of stories that don’t pay off. It’s a real pain,” Stirewalt said. “What’s easy to do is have somebody do a piece that says, ‘We’re smart, and they’re dumb.’ … It scratches the news consumer’s itch.”
The blurred line between opinion and straight news
On paper, there is a clear division between the news division at Fox News — which features anchors like Bret Baier and Bill Hemmer — and opinion hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. But when you watch the individual programs, that line gets blurred pretty quickly.
“Oftentimes, the news shows take their cues from an interview or a monologue Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity has done,” said Erik Wemple, a columnist and media critic at The Washington Post. “So, they're by no means this fair and balanced production.”
Wemple thinks one of the most cynical and brilliant moves former CEO Roger Ailes made in building Fox News was having a Washington bureau with a White House presence and credentialed reporters to cover the U.S. government. Viewers can see it at work every day, with White House correspondent Peter Doocy battling with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre daily. This dynamic didn’t exist when Trump was in the White House and current Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany was behind the podium.
“This coverage has given Fox News the fig leaf of legitimacy. And it’s a fig leaf that the opinion people at night hide behind when they pump their misinformation into the American public,” Wemple said.
Another journalistically-dubious way Fox News pushes narratives is to interview right-wing activists without identifying them on air. In the case of critical race theory, Fox News demonstrated a pattern of hosting anti-critical race theory activists and simply identifying them as concerned parents, misleading viewers about their motivation and perspective.
This didn’t just happen on the network’s opinion shows. On one October 2021 episode of “America’s Newsroom,” anchor Bill Hemmer aired interviews of three right-wing activists, describing each as just a “Fairfax County parent.” According to Media Matters, one was a former Trump administration official, one was a surrogate for then-Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin and one was the founder of an organization that was suing the Fairfax school district.
While this type of misinformation creates obvious problems for citizens and policymakers, it also impacts the local work of journalists simply trying to cover what’s happening in their community. In Winfrey’s case, she was forced to switch hats from an education reporter to a fact-checker, while fewer readers were turning to her reporting and newspaper as their primary source of information.
“I think more often, people are reading their local papers less and less, which is not great because these local issues are what ultimately have the most effect on your life,” Winfrey said, faulting the focus on social media and outlets like Fox News. “What these county commissioners are doing with our tax dollars and what laws the state legislature are enacting, that’s what affects us the most, and it’s also what gets the least amount of attention.”
An eyewitness account of Fox News’ evolution
On Oct. 7, 1996, Fox News began broadcasting for the first time, promising its viewers “Fair and Balanced” coverage that differed from the dominant cable news channel at the time, CNN (MSNBC also launched in 1996 a week before Fox News, replacing the short-lived America’s Talking).
Founded by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch and run by Roger Ailes, the network successfully harnessed and weaponized a strategy of convincing its viewers they could trust Fox News but not other news networks. Other news outlets are often derided as the “mainstream media,” even though Fox News is easily the most-watched cable news network in the country.
Carl Cameron was one of the first hires at Fox News, joining the network in 1995 while working in New Hampshire covering the early days of the 1996 presidential election. He was known as “Campaign Carl” to many in politics for his obsessive coverage of the early days of political campaigns. He also had some big scoops, including breaking the news of George W. Bush’s 1976 DWI arrest in the waning week of the 2000 presidential campaign.
But Cameron, who these days is the co-founder and chief political correspondent for Front Page Live, noticed things beginning to change at Fox News once Barack Obama won the 2000 presidential election and moved into the White House.
“Glenn Beck took over the 5 p.m. newscast and for two years espoused Tea Party trash … straight-up Alex Jones bull, and the network did nothing about it,” Cameron said, adding that before Beck’s run, virtually every Fox News show during the daytime featured a Republican and a Democrat in an attempt to present balance. Even Hannity used to co-host his show alongside liberal counterpoint Alan Combs, who passed away in 2017.
After a run heavy on conspiracy theories (among other things, Beck baselessly said Obama’s Federal Emergency Management Agency was planning to imprison people in concentration camps), Fox News took him off the air in 2011, after a boycott and an advertiser pull-out.
Plenty of conservative news outlets, like National Review, presented a conservative viewpoint and were tough on the Obama administration. But Cameron said they stuck to the facts and never lied to their readers the way some Fox News hosts began to do.
“Everyone makes mistakes. You can probably find hosts at NPR saying stuff that isn’t exactly true. But there’s a difference between a mistake and a legitimate, planned-out lie,” Cameron said. “That’s what was different about some of the hosts at Fox News.”
Cameron said that he wasn’t featured on the network’s opinion shows for much of his time at Fox. Instead, he stuck to a schedule that began at 10 a.m. and ended at 7 p.m. But during the 2016 presidential campaign, Cameron says he was “essentially ordered” to appear on Hannity’s show, who was an outspoken on-air supporter and an off-air Trump adviser.
“I hated it. I told the truth, and Hannity often would cut me off. But more often, he would not even have anything to say after I reported. He’d say, ‘Thanks, Carl,’ and off I went,” Cameron said. “So, his audience heard me tell them that a lot of what Sean had been saying for the previous 15 minutes was horseshit.”
Not much has changed in Fox News’ approach to news under Suzanne Scott, who took over as the network’s CEO in May 2018 in the wake of sexual harassment claims that led to the ouster of both Ailes and former network star Bill O’Reilly. That shouldn’t come as a shock, considering she’s worked at Fox News for nearly her entire career and was previously the head of programming, where she oversaw the replacement of O’Reilly with Carlson and launched The Ingraham Angle.
“If I wasted any time reading stories about myself or social media posts or what have you, I wouldn’t be able to get my job done,” Scott told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “And you know what I always say? I sleep well at night.”
How journalists can approach misinformation in their beats
As misinformation and polarization began to become a larger part of Arizona politics, Small said he adjusted by taking the “truth sandwich” approach — a framework developed by author and linguist George Lakoff and promoted by New York University professor and author Jay Rosen to help focus reporting on blatant lies or wild misstatements without inadvertently spreading them further.
It basically consists of three steps: Start with the truth, indicate the lie without amplifying the specific language if possible, and return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.
“It can be a challenge, but it’s also the same challenge we’ve been working with for seven years, in a lot of ways, since the dawn of the Trump era,” Small said. “That’s not to say it’s gotten any easier, but we’ve gotten a bit more practiced at it, and I think we do a much better job now than we did a year ago, two years ago or five years ago.”
Winfrey, who is only 23 and working at her second newspaper, said she never received formal training on dealing with misinformation in her reporting. It’s something she thinks would help a lot of overwhelmed reporters at small outlets grappling with how to report on similar situations.
“I think more newsrooms need to address it and train us how to deal with it in our reporting,” Winfrey said. “Writing about disinformation is one of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with because you’re writing about people who don’t think the sky is blue, who have these views that are just not aligned with reality … but people in the community believe these things, so ignoring them doesn’t seem to be a solution.”
The Washington Post’s Wemple agrees.
“I think that to the extent you can identify misinformation on Fox News, in all cases, it’s a good idea not to keep quiet and to write that story, as well as the news coverage that gave rise to the attention, to begin with,” Wemple said. “I know that means more work and perhaps a distraction from what they were planning on doing that particular day … But my instinct on this is to be as vocal as possible.”
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
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enigma58
>>...Small and many other local reporters across the country have been forced to deal with an increasingly alarming trend in our media ecosystem — the nationalization of news led by outlets like Fox News, which often grab local stories, strip them of their context, and use them to push political agendas or conspiracy theories aimed at keeping their viewers angry...<<
Sadly, this is not just a right wing problem. Every time I hear a newscaster say, "false claims" or "so-call recount" or "President Trump's lies", I cringe. These sort of pejoratives used to have no place in mainstream news. I also cringe when I see local crime and crisis stories conflated with national arguments over gun control, global climate change or a host of other social/political causes. News media, whatever its political slant, has abandoned balance to become a weapon of advocacy, and as such, is destroying the value which society granted to the profession of journalism.
As my editor, Wilma Morrison of the old Oregon Journal,once told me, "It is not your job to reveal the truth. It is your job to fully and fairly report what others claim to be true."
Tuesday, October 11, 2022 Report this